In October, Cimo Microelectronics announced the completion of its Series B+ financing. Two names on the investor list are worth a closer look: Shenzhen Jingzhida and Zhuzhou CRRC Times High-Tech Investment.
This is not an ordinary round of financing for an ordinary chip company. Looking at who the investors are is far more important than looking at how much money was raised.
Cimo Microelectronics focuses on high-performance signal chain chips, primarily targeting data converters. This term may sound niche, but it happens to be positioned exactly at the most difficult part of analog chips for domestic substitution. And the ones paying this time are its downstream customers.
Neither the financing amount nor the valuation has been disclosed. What follows is not about numbers, but about the position of this business.
| First, Let's Get to Know This Company
Cimo Microelectronics was founded in January 2021 and is headquartered in Haidian, Beijing.
The founder, Sun Nan, has an impressive background: tenured professor in the Department of Electronic Engineering at Tsinghua University, IEEE Fellow, and Ph.D. in Engineering Science from Harvard University, with a research focus on ADC/DAC. According to public reports, after giving up his U.S. green card to return to China full-time, he led his team to publish the first mainland paper on ADC at ISSCC—the top conference in the field of chip design. Previously, he also served as an endowed professor and consultant at AMD and Texas Instruments.
The team has a strong "academic" foundation: core technical members mostly come from Tsinghua University and UESTC, complemented by an operations team with 15 years of experience in the semiconductor industry.
In terms of financing pace, the company raised over CNY 100 million in its Series A round in 2022, led by Stallicht Capital; in 2025, it completed another Series B round of over CNY 100 million, led by Jingguorui Fund. By this Series B+ round, the players at the table have changed to industrial players.
In terms of products, they cover ADC, DAC, amplifiers, voltage references, PMIC (Power Management IC), integrated AFE, and SoC (System on Chip). A few standout products include: high-precision SAR ADC with a resolution of 16 to 20 bits; multi-channel simultaneous sampling ADC for relay protection and traveling wave fault location; and a high-speed high-precision ADC CM3452 with a power consumption of 960mW, about one-third of international competitors, which is also the first high-speed high-precision ADC taped out and mass-produced in a domestic foundry.
Where are its customers? Rail transit, industrial control, instrumentation, energy and power, and communications.
To put it simply, what Cimo Microelectronics makes is not just "usable chips," but "chips that can be confidently used in industrial sites for the long term." This slight difference in wording contains the whole secret.
| What Makes Signal Chain Chips So Difficult
Let's first clarify what this thing is for.
In the real world, temperature, pressure, and current are all continuously changing analog signals. For equipment to process them, they must first be "translated" into digital signals. The entire chain responsible for this translation and conditioning is called the signal chain.
It is divided into three parts: linear products (amplifiers, comparators, etc., with a global market of about USD 4 billion), converter products (ADC and DAC, also about USD 4 billion, of which ADC accounts for 80%), and interface products (RS485, CAN, etc., about USD 3 billion).
Among the three, converters are the most difficult and also the hardest to achieve domestic substitution.
The progress of domestic substitution varies significantly. Interface products and linear products are advancing quickly—RS485 and CAN have long been mass-produced by numerous domestic manufacturers, and in the Op-Amp (Operational Amplifier) segment, SG Micro and 3peak have also stepped up to fill part of the gap. However, high-speed high-precision ADC is a real threshold: it requires both fast sampling and high precision, and no link in analog design, process, packaging, and testing can afford to slip up. To date, high-end ADCs with sampling rates above 1GHz remain largely the territory of TI and ADI.
This difference in difficulty is directly reflected in the domestic substitution rate.
China is the world's largest analog chip consumer market, accounting for about one-third of global demand. The domestic market is expected to reach CNY 245.1 billion in 2026, with a growth rate faster than the global average. Yet, the overall self-sufficiency rate is only 16% to 18%.
Breaking it down makes it clearer: in the consumer electronics sector, it has already reached 40% to 50%, and in communications, 20% to 25%. In the industrial sector, it drops to only 10% to 15%; and in automotive, it is even lower, at about 5%.
The low-to-mid-end market has basically been substituted, and the remaining gaps are entirely in industrial-grade and automotive-grade segments. The position Cimo Microelectronics holds is precisely in the industrial-grade signal chain, especially the high-precision converters within it.
| Why the Money is Coming in at This Time
Three factors have converged.
The industry has recovered first. Analog chips went through a round of inventory digestion in 2023 and 2024, making things tough. In 2025, there was a clear recovery, with demand from industrial and automotive electronics returning. This year, overseas leaders have successively raised prices, and the performance of leading domestic manufacturers has generally increased by over 50%. For companies making industrial-grade chips, expanding product lines and deploying markets at this juncture offers the best return on investment.
AI and NEVs (New Energy Vehicles), on the other hand, have elevated the value of analog chips. The number of analog chips used in an AI server far exceeds that in a regular server, and the requirements for precision and speed are higher, multiplying the value per unit several times over. Institutions predict that the compound growth rate of the domestic AI server power supply market from 2026 to 2030 could reach about 40%. The same applies to NEVs, where the analog chip usage per vehicle is two to three times that of fuel vehicles.
There is a detail worth noting here. In its official announcement, Cimo Microelectronics specifically mentioned that it will continue to layout "for emerging application scenarios such as AI intelligent computing centers, communications, and testing." This indicates that it is shifting from traditional industrial and power sectors towards the AI computing power track, which has the fastest incremental growth. And what this track lacks most is high-speed ADC—precisely the direction it has been focusing on in recent years.
There is another easily overlooked point: the ability to deliver stably is a capability in itself. In scenarios like industrial, power, and rail transit, customers often care more about reliability and continuous supply than just low prices. In the past, domestic high-end equipment could only buy imported high-performance ADCs and DACs, which were not only expensive but also had unpredictable delivery times. At this point, a manufacturer that can integrate everything from forward R&D in architecture design to domestic tape-out verification and then scaled mass production is selling not just chips, but a backup plan that does not rely on overseas processes.
| Why Industrial Players are Paying
This is the most noteworthy part of this round of financing.
Jingzhida, founded in 2011, is a veteran in domestic semiconductor test and inspection equipment. Its products cover display panel inspection and memory test equipment, with customers including BOE, YMTC (Yangtze Memory Technologies Co., Ltd.), and CXMT. In the first half of this year, its semiconductor memory test equipment business grew by 147% year-on-year. Behind CRRC Times High-Tech is Times Electric from the CRRC system, with business spanning rail transit, new energy, semiconductors, automotive, and industrial sectors.
See the commonality? These two are not only downstream customers of Cimo Microelectronics but also partners in the industry chain.
Jingzhida corresponds to test and measurement—the most typical application area for high-precision ADC and DAC. CRRC Times High-Tech corresponds to rail transit and energy power—another core market for Cimo Microelectronics.
Therefore, the essence of this money is: downstream customers use equity to lock a key component supplier by their side.
For Cimo Microelectronics, this is more valuable than receiving pure financial investment. What comes in are order channels, real-world scenarios, and long-term binding relationships. This also explains why the primary use of the funds is to "expand product lines"—with the demand side assured, they dare to invest heavily in R&D to fill in product categories without worrying about producing things that won't sell.
| A Reality Check is Also Needed
Optimism aside, a few things need to be clarified.
The Series B+ round only shows that capital is still following, and it may also indicate that the company has not yet developed a profitable model that can support a higher valuation. Cimo Microelectronics has raised four rounds so far and is currently still in the investment phase—this is normal in the chip design industry, but it is still far from "making it."
The verification of industrial chips is terrifyingly slow. For industrial customers to adopt a chip, the process of sampling, testing, small-batch trials, and long-term reliability verification normally takes one to two years before mass production can begin. There is a long way between "being designed in" and "being purchased in large quantities." This is also the reason why industrial-grade chip companies generally scale up slowly.
The opponents across the table are veterans with decades of experience. The processes, IP, ecosystems, and customer trust accumulated by TI and ADI in high-speed high-precision ADC form a deep moat. For domestic manufacturers, "matching parameters" and "large-scale commercial substitution" are two different things. The power consumption of CM3452 is reduced to one-third of its competitors, and the specs are indeed impressive, but looking good on paper does not equal securing orders; it still relies on customers verifying it chip by chip.
The ceiling of the track itself is not particularly high. The global signal chain's three segments add up to about USD 10 billion, with converters accounting for USD 4 billion, and high-speed high-precision ADC is just one part of it. The degree of being choked off is extremely high, but the market size is just this big. How far the company can go largely depends on whether it can expand outward from converters and develop amplifiers, voltage references, PMIC, and AFE together—this is also the significance of its "coverage of seven product lines."
It is still a stage of pouring in money now. The official announcement clearly states that the funds will be spent on expanding product lines, market promotion, and hiring. It will take time for high-margin industrial products to account for a larger proportion; and R&D expenses need to be amortized by scale, which also requires revenue to go up first.
| Conclusion
The domestic substitution for consumer-grade and communication-grade has basically been completed. The tough battles remaining are industrial-grade and automotive-grade—which have the lowest domestic substitution rate and the highest threshold, yet rely most on a pull from downstream demand.
How to fight this battle is changing in terms of conditions. Having impressive parameters is not enough; there must be engineering capabilities to run through mass production on domestic processes. Having financial investment is not enough; there must be scenarios and orders from downstream customers binding together. Having single-point products is also not enough; a complete signal chain must be laid out.
The three characteristics of Cimo Microelectronics' this round of financing—led by industrial players, funds directed towards product lines, and adherence to full forward design and domestic process closed-loop—correspond exactly to these three points.
On the track of signal chains, which is the hardest to achieve domestic substitution, industrial capital has already placed its bet with real money.
This article is written based on official disclosures from Cimo Microelectronics and public industry materials. The financing amount, valuation, and shareholding ratio have not been officially disclosed. Data such as industry market size and domestic substitution rate come from public research and are for background reference only. The background of the investors comes from public materials, and their strategic intentions are analytical judgments based on public information, not official statements from the investors. The relevant analysis is based solely on public information, does not constitute a factual determination, nor does it constitute investment advice; the consequences of decisions made by readers based on this are unrelated to the author and the publishing platform. If there are any discrepancies or rights claims, please contact us for corrections.